Established 2007, for better or worse

Menu

Pointing machinery at the scenery™

Don’t fence me in?

Rangering at the Lang Craigs continues to be a joy. We had a staff and volunteers meeting last month and there’slots of good stuff planned for the year ahead including the last community tree planting day and bunch of wildlife stuff. The site is jumping with fur, feathers and fangs, it’ll be good to know what it all is.

Some of it is deer of course, who are definitely not invites and I run out of fingers taking note of how many saplings they eat. This is one of the big reasons my main task is to keep an eye on the fence which runs around six miles or so around the perimeter. Doing the fence in one go is a big task, although the distance isn’t great the terrain is pretty taxing at times with a lot of ascent and some hairy water crossings. So great fun then. You should come along.

In the pre-Christmas storms a few trees were brought down and one of them took down a good bit of the fence. Me and Joycee took up rope, bow saws, hammer and nails and had a wee bit of fun with it all as the rain pattered down on us. The tree was pretty big and the branches that took out the fence averaged around a foot in diameter, but they cut easy enough, and it helps to have different blades to chose from. The wire was trashed, stretched all to hell but we knitted an impression of a fence out of it and the top line was high enough to dissuade Bambi and Co from hanging out here on Friday night with a carry-oot and trying their luck. We tensioned it by weaving the wire around groups of nails and seems to have held up to now.

I have a lot of fun with this stuff and it also makes me use a bunch of outdoor different gear. I’m in boots most of the time in the site and I don’t wear any lightweight shell clothing, it does get trashed in the trees and squeezing through gaps etc so I tend to wear my Fjallraven Keb Jacket which I reviewed recently or now that it’s properly miserable the Paramo Alta II that’s in the photies, which perfect for this. well, in a slightly always too hot or too cold way.
Ah, I’ll come back to that.